People are increasingly carrying personal communications devices with them in their daily lives. Some personal communications devices are designed to be amenable to habitual wearing or carrying by users. For instance, people commonly wear Bluetooth™ headsets which connect to cellular mobile, and which operate in cooperation with the mobile phones for making and receiving telephone calls. Personal communications devices designed to be amenable to habitual wearing or carrying by users are sometimes referred to as “handsfree personal communications devices,” or “handsfree devices” for short.
In comparison to mobile phones, handsfree devices typically have limited capabilities due to factors including constraints on size, weight, cost and the like. Some handsfree devices are operable to communicate wirelessly with other personal communications devices (e.g., mobile phones). Through communication with such other communications devices, handsfree devices provide additional capabilities they could not provide alone. For example, Bluetooth™ headsets that connect wirelessly to Bluetooth™ enabled mobile phones provide the capability for a user of the Bluetooth™ headset to make a telephone call in cooperation with the connected mobile phone.
The range of functionality which a handsfree device may have when cooperating with a personal communication device is typically fixed by one or both of the user interface of the handsfree device and the interface(s) by which the handsfree device and personal communication device communicate with one another. In some cases, the user interface of the handsfree device limits the range of functionality which can be accessed by a user of handsfree device to a subset of the potential functionality enabled by the personal communication device or to a subset of the potential functionality enabled by the communication interface(s) between the handsfree device and the personal communication device.
Example areas of potential functionality not accessible from some handsfree devices include:                emergency communications;        SMS messaging;        direct number dialing; and/or        the like.        